Isn't this what Twitter is supposed to do. They cite the example Anipals that groups animal charity activists, did they intentionally set that up as a hash tag? I hear hipsters were all using this cool new word SXSW last week.

If you couldn't identify tweets of interest to you by identifying unique language then Twitter wouldn't work. I am sure there are hilarious incidences of duplicated hashtags bring together groups of people ironically as we'll.

It's exactly the same linguistic analysis that has been studied for years, just using a vast pool of pre-existing data. If you take out the media friendly Twitter headline, it's just another dry and academic study, and probably reasonably valuable.

It's exactly the same linguistic analysis that has been studied for years, just using a vast pool of pre-existing data. If you take out the media friendly Twitter headline, it's just another dry and academic study, and probably reasonably valuable.

Its value, according to the article, lies in the putative ability to predict user group affiliation, and the info will be sold to advertisers for directed marketing purposes.

I'm sort of ambivalent about it; on the one hand I can keep some of my weirder ramblings off Facebook which works because I have like 1/30th the followers vs. Facebook friends, but on the other hand I seriously stumbled onto an account for one of those pro-anorexia/bulimia people who had A THOUSAND FOLLOWERS. For reals. So frankly this doesn't surprise me at all.

KiltedBastich:Speaking as someone with a degree in sociology, I can tell you that a great deal of sociology is trying to understand why humans do the particular stupid things that they do.

They just usually aren't allowed to actually come out and call those stupid things actually stupid.

Speaking as someone with a degree in psychology, I say: Join us in the Dark Side, for we are allowed to do so. I structured an entire Cognitive Psychology lecture around Sternberg et al.'s work on the psychology of stupidity. It was fun, and astoundingly practical for a cog psych lecture.

Faddy:If you couldn't identify tweets of interest to you by identifying unique language then Twitter wouldn't work. I am sure there are hilarious incidences of duplicated hashtags bring together groups of people ironically as we'll.

I was at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative conference a few weeks ago, which is the main get-together for instructional tech people. Lots and lots of folks use Twitter to comment on conference talks, and so the #ELI tag showed up as trending on Twitter for a few hours

If only there were some kind of social network that encouraged people to separate into tribes already.A company like that would have cleaned up financially and probably continue to dominate the online landscape today.